TMC NEWS

TMCNET eNEWSLETTER SIGNUP

Blue Box Completes Series A Funding

(Marketwire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) SEATTLE, WA -- (Marketwire) -- 01/22/13 --
Blue Box, a leading cloud hosting and managed services company, today announced the completion of its Series A funding bringing total capital raised to over $4.3 million. Based on the interest surrounding the company, the round was over-subscribed, increasing from the original $3.5 million round led by Voyager Capital. Founder Collective, a leading seed stage investment firm, led the Series A funding closing effort. In addition, Blue Box announced that it has appointed David Frankel, Managing Partner at Founder Collective to its Board of Directors.

This round represents an extension of Blue Box's first equity investment and will be used to accelerate product innovation, secure additional engineering talent, and expand its marketing and sales efforts. With nearly 600 clients including MTV, VH1, Seeking Alpha, Pivotal Tracker, Agawi and Crowdstar, Blue Box provides a managed, intelligent and highly automated application infrastructure that enables customers to focus their energy on building and improving their web applications.

"Blue Box is in a rapid growth phase. They've been around for nearly a decade, they're profitable, growing revenue, and have a great strategic vision," said David Frankel, Managing Partner, Founder Collective. "Blue Box is focused on orchestrating the infrastructure that supports critical applications so their customers can focus on doing what they do best -- building better applications. And Blue Box's control over the whole technology stack means they can deliver the unmatched customizability, up time and scalability necessary for success. These are Blue Box's key differentiators and some of many reasons we chose to add to this venture investment round."
In addition to being Managing Partner at Founder Collective, David Frankel is the co-founder and former CEO of Internet Solutions (IS), the largest private internet service provider in Africa. IS was sold to Dimension Data plc in 1997.

"We're excited to have David Frankel and Founder Collective lead the secondary closing. David has extensive experience in our space and we are pleased to have a founder-based fund participate," said Jesse Proudman, CEO, Blue Box. "This investment completes our national syndication with investors on both the West Coast and East Coast, and will allow Blue Box to further invest in productizing our service offering and building out our architecture to support our next stage of growth."
Blue Box has recently expanded its datacenter footprint into multiple geographies in both the Seattle and Washington D.C. areas with plans for an international footprint in Q1 2013. Blue Box's ownership of the hardware infrastructure illustrates its core philosophy and commitment to owning the entire customer experience and assists in providing unparalleled white-glove service. The company's continued explosive customer growth is fueled in part by an automated service platform that enforces best practices across a combination of OpenStack, EMC Razor, Opscode Chef and proprietary technologies and intellectual property.

About Blue Box
Established in 2003, Blue Box is a leading cloud hosting and managed services company. Nearly 600 companies use Blue Box's managed cloud application hosting for infrastructure solutions. Its clients receive white-glove 24/7 support through its industry-leading technical implementation and management expertise. Blue Box leverages an assortment of open source technologies including Open Stack, EMC Razor and Opscode's Chef alongside Blue Box intellectual property and technologies. With ownership and control of the infrastructure, Blue Box delivers comprehensive, customizable hosting solutions with game-changing uptime to enterprises and applications of any size. To learn more about Blue Box's pioneering activities, visit www.bluebox.net, email sales@bluebox.net, or call toll-free: 1-800-613-4305.